History of Chicago
Open-knowledge reference entry
Chicago has played a central role in American economic, cultural and political history. Since the 1870s Chicago has been the largest and most dominant metropolis in the Midwestern United States. The recorded history begins with the arrival of French explorers, missionaries and fur traders in the late 17th century and their interaction with the local Potawatomi Native Americans. Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a black freeman, by 1790 was the first permanent non-indigenous settler in the area. The small settlement was defended by Fort Dearborn after its completion in 1804, but was abandoned as part of the War of 1812 in expectation of an attack by the Potawatomi, who caught up with the retreating soldiers and civilians not two miles south of the fort. The modern city was incorporated in 1837 by Northern businessmen and grew rapidly from real estate speculation and the realization that it had a commanding position in the emerging inland transportation network, based on lake traffic and railroads, controlling access from the Great Lakes and the eastern states into the Mississippi River basin.
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This entry incorporates text from “History of Chicago” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.